The Problem of Fundamental Types in Art History

Abstract

Generally speaking, the method of art history today has three main directions, namely-tendency of formal-history, of spiritual history and that of personal-history. But, irrespective of such tendency, in recent movements of art history we can find out a common methodical efforts to grasp concretely the total character of individual artworks on the basis of some fundamental homogeneities perceived intuitively in the historical process ; that is the problem of fundamental types in art history. Now we also try to solve this typological problem by establishing systematically the fundamental types of art-spirit or of art-consciousness. From our point of view, art-spirit has, as its components, three elements peculiarly its own, -its own attitude, faculty and means ; that is to say, in its attitude it is either ego-centric (A) or nature-centric (B), in its faculty either sensitive (C) or intuitive (D), in its means either ideal (E) or figurative (F). From these three pairs of motives we can form eight fundamental types of art-spirit : the type of expressionism (A-C-E), of impressionism (A-C-F), of constructivism (A-D-E), of idealism (A-D-F), of symbolism (B-C-E), of decorativism (B-C-F), of abstractivism (B-D-E), and finally that of realism (B-D-F). Thus we may expect that studies of our art history will be more successful by means of these fundamental types.